A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
One of the things that makes me very sad about AI is the quality dropping all over the place and nobody really seems to care? At least no where near the amount of people I would have thought.
There are people I’ve worked with for years that were very good at their job. They were always proud of everything they did and took the time to do stuff right instead of half-assing a job. But then they started using AI and just press the easy button on everything they do. I’m pretty sure some of them no longer have the skills they once had and would take 5-10 years to get back to where they were. The quality of the output has been dropping steadily and my pushback on the quality hasn’t been welcome and AI has been blamed for mistakes. Like my dude, just because you pressed the AI button doesn’t mean you are no longer responsible. The AI didn’t fuck up, you fucked up, you are supposed to check the AI output. It’s still your work, even though you let the AI do all of the work. Management has been praising the increased output, even though I feel the only reason there’s more output is because the quality has dropped. Instances where a 4 hour job takes 20 mins are heralded as the best thing since sliced bread. But there are so many instances where a job gets sent back multiple times, because it was simply wrong and terrible. But that’s labeled as me being picky or hating on AI just because it’s AI. And there have also been times someone was hard stuck because the AI couldn’t do what we needed and I needed to take over the task.
I feel like the odd one out, not praising AI and pushing back. I wouldn’t have thought so many people, especially people I used to respect a lot, would become so in love and addicted to AI. In a couple of years our code base is going to be totally fucked and nobody is going to be able to get it back.
Tech has been my passion my entire life and for the first time I feel like I might not be a fit for tech anymore. I want to be proud at something I created, not take credit for pushing the “Do the thing” button. I want to craft my own code, not be a sloperator or “prompt engineer”. Hardware has become so expensive, my current computer looks like my last computer for at least the foreseeable future. And it seems like I’m the crazy one out, with everybody being happy with the slop the AI shits out.
And yes, LLM written code is the asbestos of our time that will take decades to clean up.
My fear is: Nobody will clean it up, this is just how tech will be from now on.
It might not be a fully rational fear, but I feel like we’re not living in a rational world and haven’t been for a while now.
I feel like that’s a fear for everybody that lived through Y2k. We came so dang close to everything breaking, and I think we came away from that with hubris and not foresight.
I made bank back then tho. I did a small project for a local company to get their stuff ready voor Y2K and they had a group of techs working on a lot of stuff. I started running with that crew and did job after job, mostly doing the exact same thing we did for the previous company. And the money was very good, since a lot of companies were scared they wouldn’t be ready.
For me it did feel very different, because everyone was afraid everything would break. But I was actively working on preventing stuff from going wrong. And in the end we did a very good job, all of our clients got through without any issues.
Now I feel like I’ve been thrown in the deep end of the pool and no matter how much I swim, I keep sinking further down.
I was pretty young when it was going on, so I didn’t really understand it until later. I just worry that we’ve, culturally, come away from it with a “oh, I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal after all, we can do this again next time” mentality and not a “it took a lot of hard work to keep this from happening, we should prepare better in the future” outlook.
I’ve got the same worry about the lessons we learned after the pandemic, now that I think about it, lol.
As expected from an article that attributes “insanity” to people, it misses the root for why it is happening. It talks about board members, CEOs, and regular personnel, but it fully ignores shareholders.
AI promises to be the final conquest of capital: a form of labor that is privately owned and wants to be privately owned, which can be removed from existence when it is not needed and which needs comparatively little to exist. No revolution, no union, no secret loathing.
In a world that is rapidly going up in smoke, capital owners have few places to invest. The stock market is a bubble where speculation is far more important than return on investment. AI is just about the only hope shareholders have for the continuation of their wealth.
All the “insanity” of corporations is them trying to cater to shareholders’ actual need. Not profit, and definitely not production, but the development of a form of labor that will not rebel as billions perish.
If AI not working means the rich will get eaten, the rich have no incentive to care about realities in which AI does not work, no matter how likely. AI fanaticism is perfectly sane, from their perspective.
Very well said. Agreed with those material realities or at least fantasies.
I also think there is a more immediate, less existential incentive, that lets individuals pretend like they’re just acting out the (bad) efficiencies of the rational new market while ignoring the awful existential endgame of continuing to enact the will of capital (I won’t say the will of shareholders because many of them would also claim their hands are tied).
They can pretend it’s just one more of their money tricks where they extract more profits or externalise more costs, like with the Metaverse or Web3 or NFTs before it.
I like how Rushkoff puts this: “going meta” as owners’ way to keep the grift rolling, just keep going more meta, more abstract, more virtual.
Until the market is so far removed from the reality of trees and rivers and human bodies and clean air… well anyway I’m on a rant.
But my point is I hate how this fucked over financialized worldview makes it seem like every step along the road to apocalypse is rational and inevitable. Like we’re powerless to stop it.
It’s an economic theory, not an asteroid hurtling towards us. It literally runs on people.
I know that odd one out feeling when it comes to AI too. My last role I frequently said the AI output was bad and usually wrong. Others would blindly copy/paste its output and send it to the customer, seemingly without reading any of the customers message or the AI output.
One of the things that makes me very sad about AI is the quality dropping all over the place and nobody really seems to care? At least no where near the amount of people I would have thought.
There are people I’ve worked with for years that were very good at their job. They were always proud of everything they did and took the time to do stuff right instead of half-assing a job. But then they started using AI and just press the easy button on everything they do. I’m pretty sure some of them no longer have the skills they once had and would take 5-10 years to get back to where they were. The quality of the output has been dropping steadily and my pushback on the quality hasn’t been welcome and AI has been blamed for mistakes. Like my dude, just because you pressed the AI button doesn’t mean you are no longer responsible. The AI didn’t fuck up, you fucked up, you are supposed to check the AI output. It’s still your work, even though you let the AI do all of the work. Management has been praising the increased output, even though I feel the only reason there’s more output is because the quality has dropped. Instances where a 4 hour job takes 20 mins are heralded as the best thing since sliced bread. But there are so many instances where a job gets sent back multiple times, because it was simply wrong and terrible. But that’s labeled as me being picky or hating on AI just because it’s AI. And there have also been times someone was hard stuck because the AI couldn’t do what we needed and I needed to take over the task.
I feel like the odd one out, not praising AI and pushing back. I wouldn’t have thought so many people, especially people I used to respect a lot, would become so in love and addicted to AI. In a couple of years our code base is going to be totally fucked and nobody is going to be able to get it back.
Tech has been my passion my entire life and for the first time I feel like I might not be a fit for tech anymore. I want to be proud at something I created, not take credit for pushing the “Do the thing” button. I want to craft my own code, not be a sloperator or “prompt engineer”. Hardware has become so expensive, my current computer looks like my last computer for at least the foreseeable future. And it seems like I’m the crazy one out, with everybody being happy with the slop the AI shits out.
I think this article goes into some details why what you describe is happening: https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking
And yes, LLM written code is the asbestos of our time that will take decades to clean up.
Thanks for the link, interesting article.
My fear is: Nobody will clean it up, this is just how tech will be from now on. It might not be a fully rational fear, but I feel like we’re not living in a rational world and haven’t been for a while now.
I feel like that’s a fear for everybody that lived through Y2k. We came so dang close to everything breaking, and I think we came away from that with hubris and not foresight.
Yeah I remember those days.
I made bank back then tho. I did a small project for a local company to get their stuff ready voor Y2K and they had a group of techs working on a lot of stuff. I started running with that crew and did job after job, mostly doing the exact same thing we did for the previous company. And the money was very good, since a lot of companies were scared they wouldn’t be ready.
For me it did feel very different, because everyone was afraid everything would break. But I was actively working on preventing stuff from going wrong. And in the end we did a very good job, all of our clients got through without any issues.
Now I feel like I’ve been thrown in the deep end of the pool and no matter how much I swim, I keep sinking further down.
I was pretty young when it was going on, so I didn’t really understand it until later. I just worry that we’ve, culturally, come away from it with a “oh, I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal after all, we can do this again next time” mentality and not a “it took a lot of hard work to keep this from happening, we should prepare better in the future” outlook.
I’ve got the same worry about the lessons we learned after the pandemic, now that I think about it, lol.
As expected from an article that attributes “insanity” to people, it misses the root for why it is happening. It talks about board members, CEOs, and regular personnel, but it fully ignores shareholders.
AI promises to be the final conquest of capital: a form of labor that is privately owned and wants to be privately owned, which can be removed from existence when it is not needed and which needs comparatively little to exist. No revolution, no union, no secret loathing.
In a world that is rapidly going up in smoke, capital owners have few places to invest. The stock market is a bubble where speculation is far more important than return on investment. AI is just about the only hope shareholders have for the continuation of their wealth.
All the “insanity” of corporations is them trying to cater to shareholders’ actual need. Not profit, and definitely not production, but the development of a form of labor that will not rebel as billions perish.
If AI not working means the rich will get eaten, the rich have no incentive to care about realities in which AI does not work, no matter how likely. AI fanaticism is perfectly sane, from their perspective.
Very well said. Agreed with those material realities or at least fantasies.
I also think there is a more immediate, less existential incentive, that lets individuals pretend like they’re just acting out the (bad) efficiencies of the rational new market while ignoring the awful existential endgame of continuing to enact the will of capital (I won’t say the will of shareholders because many of them would also claim their hands are tied).
They can pretend it’s just one more of their money tricks where they extract more profits or externalise more costs, like with the Metaverse or Web3 or NFTs before it.
I like how Rushkoff puts this: “going meta” as owners’ way to keep the grift rolling, just keep going more meta, more abstract, more virtual. Until the market is so far removed from the reality of trees and rivers and human bodies and clean air… well anyway I’m on a rant.
But my point is I hate how this fucked over financialized worldview makes it seem like every step along the road to apocalypse is rational and inevitable. Like we’re powerless to stop it.
It’s an economic theory, not an asteroid hurtling towards us. It literally runs on people.
I know that odd one out feeling when it comes to AI too. My last role I frequently said the AI output was bad and usually wrong. Others would blindly copy/paste its output and send it to the customer, seemingly without reading any of the customers message or the AI output.